[MUD-Dev] [DGN] MUD developer's motives

[John Bertoglio]

From: "Brandon J. Van Every" <vanevery at 3DProgrammer.com>

<snip to question>

> Bottom line: what are you trying to get done by building MUDs?

A simple question that contains many other questions. Here are two:

First question in the question: Why a MUD? (Which I define for the
sake of this discussion as a traditional text-only, online world.)

  First answer: Because a text-based system is the only vehicle for
  building an online world with a small team. One of Raph Koster's
  early posts suggested that the original release of Ultima Online
  had XX man-years of development time just in the game
  art. Clearly, this puts a full-scale graphical world outside of
  the scope of a project I want to devote a part-time effort to.

Second question: Why build an online world?

  Second answer: Aside from a vague idea that there is a small scale
  commercial model here (i.e. make some money), my reasons are
  fairly simple. In launching an online world you create a living
  thing. Like a child, you have some control over it, especially
  early in its development. As it grows, it develops a life of its
  own. It is watching this unfold that I find facinating and very
  much look forward to.

Other stuff: My business is creating multi-user systems with a
database back-end.  Building a mud provides an environment,
unconstrained by annoying elements like clients and deadlines, in
which to expand our development framework and test new ideas. The
reason our project is not "finished" (to the degree that such a
thing is possible) is that we have had to change/upgrade our
database/app server platform four times in four years.

Look forward to other folks answers.

John A. Bertoglio
co-laboratory
503.781.3563
www.co-laboratory.com
jb at co-laboratory.com


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